


resolution

by rougeatre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Post-Hogwarts, Underlying Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 04:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17257187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rougeatre/pseuds/rougeatre
Summary: New year’s resolutions 1979:1. Try to be good.2. Face own mortality with grace and equanimity (ha).3. Stop being a fucking twat.





	resolution

And – awake. Flash through him, heart hammering. He lies there a moment, unwilling or unable to open his eyes. When he does he groans. Actually groans aloud, alone in his single bed, sheets and blankets tangled around him, still in last night’s clothes and with the thick, paste-like sensation of last night’s booze and fags in his mouth. “Oh, fuck.” And, there they are: the first words of which Remus Lupin is cognitively aware of speaking in 1979.

Oh fuck, and again, as he tries to piece together what happened the night before. James and Lily’s party seemed to comprise most of the people they'd known at Hogwarts, people he hadn't really spoken to since they left. Remus was always insular at school, not deliberately necessarily, but he was. It was clear that most people hadn’t missed him. In fact the more the flat filled up the more uncomfortable he felt, cramped in a corner of the kitchen with Peter, unable really to hear what he was saying over strains of Talking Heads and Lily’s soul records. Until Peter produced a bottle of Firewhiskey, after which point things get a bit hazy.

It’s:

midnight, and everyone is counting down, and he’s with Lily now, and she shouts in his ear, _Happy new year!_ before James throws an arm around her, grinning at Remus, and pulls her into a kiss, leaving Remus to look around and think he only sees strangers.

sitting out on the tiny balcony looking down onto the traffic and steadily drinking, a hand on his shoulder, Moony, you all right there, Moony.

Sirius, with his arm round him, love you so much, mate, love you, yeah, love you.

while no one’s paying attention, stepping out onto the balcony, choosing a star and staring up at it to make himself focus, even though it’s double and now one and shifting, thinking, destination, deliberation, the other one, and then, and then…

and nothing. And then here. He buries his face in his pillow to muffle another moan.

It’s his bladder that propels him out of bed in the end. If it were possible, anatomically speaking, he might have chosen to spend the entire year rolling around between self-loathing and self-pity. But the need to piss has become pressing. So he gets up, squinting his eyes closed against the rush of blood from his head and the attendant awareness of a headache that literally pulses, like a living thing. Bloody hell.

In the bathroom he manages to relieve himself and attempt some pretty ineffectual retching over the filthy toilet bowl, before gulping down some stale water from the cold tap. Only when he’s back in his room does he spot it. A bit crumpled, ink smudged, but probably legible. There, at the foot of his bed. A list. In his stomach the too-familiar sensation of apprehension, a sharp little jab upwards at his diaphragm. Probably nothing, he rationalises. Just something he wrote drunk. Probably it doesn’t make any sense. Best to discard it and not think about it again.

A moment passes. Something, somewhere, moves incrementally. He seizes it up and reads:

_New year’s resolutions 1979:_

  1. _Try to be good._
  2. _Face own mortality with grace and equanimity (ha)._
  3. _Stop being a fucking twat._



He stares at it for a moment. There’s something to be said for his drunken spelling, he supposes.

Then he thinks, fuck it. Says it out loud to the empty room for the feel of it there with him: “Fuck it.” He yanks off his jeans and crawls back under the covers in his boxers and last night’s t-shirt. _Try to be good_. As he closes his eyes he determines not to open them again until he’s somehow transformed into someone else.

 

He’s in the shack. It’s winter outside, wind rattling the window, cold that seeps in through invisible cracks like fingers curled and grasping, emanates from the earth so that it forms one single continuum with his body lying prone on the ground. He doesn’t know where the others have gone. They’ve left him, he supposes. For good, this time. The thought should be worrying, or upsetting, but it’s not, not really. Likewise he should check for damage to his body. But instead he lies very, very still. Peaceful, he thinks, or rather a voice seems to whisper from far off. It’s soothing. Honey-smoothness of it, spread from the top of his head to his fingertips, his toes. Could lie here forever. Only – there it is. The sound of it, _drip, drip, drip_. At first he ignores it, but then, again: _drip, drip, drip_. Now his heart quickens in his chest, frightened animal. Louder, now. _Drip, drip, drip, drip…_

His eyes drift open and he realises, vaguely, that he must have been dreaming. Still it’s there, _drip, drip, drip_ , and he feels his heart still battering at his chest. But then the dripping becomes knocking, and he realises all at once that he’s awake, and home. Or, rather, at the un-home in Leytonstone, and never mind, anyway, because someone’s here.

“Moony. Moony. I know you’re in there, I’ve seen your flatmate. Moony?” A pause as the ceiling jars and then drifts into focus. A sound rises in his throat, halfway a word, but it doesn’t come in time. “Right, that’s it, I’m coming in.” The door swings open and Sirius is standing in his room, a little dishevelled and also in last night’s clothes, but otherwise not too much the worse for wear. “You’re still alive, then, at least.”

In the interest of dignity Remus pushes himself to an upright position, back against unstable headboard. “Happy new year to you too.”

“We already said that last night. If you remember.”

Remus does remember, vaguely, but doesn’t bother to defend himself. He suspects that any stand he might make would quickly reveal itself to be upon unstable ground. “Apologies, then.”

Sirius crosses the room in two long strides and sits on the desk, which creaks warningly under his weight. His feet rest on the desk chair. Unlike James, constantly in motion – tapping, jiggling his leg, chewing the corner of his thumbnail as he thinks – Sirius’s capacity for stillness is rivalled only by a predator sighting its prey. Still, now, as he regards Remus across the small expanse of stained brown carpet. Remus pulls the blankets further up around his waist, suddenly anxious that his boxers might be on display.

“You disappeared last night, then,” says Sirius eventually. He moves then, affecting studying his hand. Pale and delicate, it might have been carved from marble. Only a true aristocrat could have such fine features. In comparison Remus has always felt himself to be more like roughly hewn from wood.

“I was pretty pissed. Wanted to get to bed.”

“You didn’t say anything to anyone. Lily was worried. Thought you’d splinched yourself. Wormtail had to go out and check for bits of you.”

“Second nature, I suppose,” though privately he thinks it really is something of a miracle that he made it back in one piece. “Was the rest of the party good?”

“All right, I suppose. Better when you were there.”

“You don’t have to butter me up, you know, I haven’t got much to offer these days.” As though he were literally about to offer up the contents of his room he glances around at his paltry possessions. Half of his things are left behind in his childhood bedroom, giving the room a sense of impermanence only added to by the peeling wallpaper, the half-hearted attempt to repaint the skirting board.

Sirius doesn’t laugh, which is fair enough. Instead he nods to the list, now lying on the floor next to the bedside lamp. “What’s that?”

In fact Remus had forgotten about it, and ignores the frantic urge to shove it out of sight. Instead he shrugs. “Just some resolutions I made when I was pissed.”

“What are they, then?”

He makes himself raise his eyebrows. “None of your business.”

“Merlin you’re a miserable bugger when you’re hungover.”

“Well no one’s forcing you to be here.”

They meet one another’s eye and Sirius starts to laugh. Only when Remus looks away, focusing instead on the bump of his knee under the blanket, does he reluctantly join in.  

“Is it as bad as last year?” asks Sirius.

“God, no. I can see you’re not, either.”

“I thought I was going to be hungover for the rest of my life.”

A pause then. It seems to hum. Remus finds himself reaching for something else to say. In the end he settles on: “You kept taking the piss out of my accent.”

“You’d gone all _Welsh_ again. You only do that when you’re plastered.”

“You hexed Kit Macmillan for imitating me in second year.”

“Did I?”

Of course, Sirius doesn’t remember. Remus has long since learned to pretend he doesn’t remember things the way he does. All of it, it seems sometimes, in technicolour. But now in his enfeebled state he’s let his guard down, and has to cover as best he can. “Yes. I remember it well. Boils, I think.”

“Well I’m allowed to do it, I’m your mate. And Kit Macmillan was a twat, he probably deserved it anyway.”

“He was all right.” In fact Remus gave Kit Macmillan a fairly memorable blowjob at the end of sixth year that he intends to conceal from Sirius until they’re both dead. As such he changes the subject. “Any chance of you leaving me alone long enough for me to get dressed?”

“What’ve I got to leave you alone for? We shared a room for seven years, just get on with it.”

“I want to have a wash. I feel vile.” The latter, at least, is true. But the thought of getting undressed in front of Sirius, now. He can’t. “You could make us both a cup of tea, if you fancy.”

“What am I now, your house elf?”

“It’s character building.”

“Go on then. Seeing as you look so desiccated.”

“Fuck off.”

Sirius does, leaving Remus to heave himself out of bed for the second time of the new year. He may as well wash now, he supposes, so he gathers up last night’s jeans along with some other clean or clean-ish clothes from the wardrobe and goes back to the bathroom. Shivering, he swishes some water around the sink to remove the worst of the grime before running the hot tap until the water heats up and filling it. As he stands there splashing under his armpits he reflects on the conversation with Sirius. Tries to look at it as though from a distance. The silence when they started talking about last new year bothered him the most, he thinks. That and the weirdness about undressing. He wonders if Sirius feels it as well. Like something heavy suspended in the air between them.

An image, unbidden, of Sirius last night: laughing with Frank Longbottom and Mary Macdonald, mouth wide, head back. Remus meets Mary’s eye for a second, and she smiles at him, but she’s drawn back in before the circle can open up, leaving him to take another swig of Firewhiskey and pretend he’s looking for Lily.

Well. Things change, everyone knows that. But still he can’t help thinking that since they left school, and even before, there’s been a distance between Sirius and him. It’s hard to resist the idea that it’s probably his own fault. Even a year later, a year exactly, he can’t move on. _Stop being a fucking twat_. Easier said than done.

He isn’t even sure that Sirius remembers. He, on the other hand, remembers with a kind of hallucinogenic clarity. Even the morning after, stepping over the debris in the common room with his bare feet and finding Sirius passed out on the sofa, legs hanging off and clinging to the arm like a life raft. He shook his shoulder to wake him and held out a glass of water to him without saying anything. As his eyes slowly opened there was a moment when Remus thought he saw everything in his face. A kind of shift, or motion, like a leaf tumbling from a branch. Not that he had a chance to make much sense of it, as Sirius sat up quickly, ignoring the water, and said with his head clutched in his hands, Fuck _me_ I’m going to _die._

That’s not it, though. He feels it now, an inexorable pull towards the memory. Sometimes when he feels himself approaching it but retreats just in time, he thinks of it as like a very treasured song that he can only listen to very, very rarely for fear of it being unbearable, or worse, of sullying it for himself. Other times he thinks it’s just too confusing. But now he’s too exhausted to retreat, and so he dries himself, and perches on the edge of the bathtub, and remembers.

 

Parties even back then are overwhelming, and so he’s gone upstairs to smoke quietly out the window of their dorm. There’s something agreeable about this, he remembers thinking. The distant hum of conversation, indistinct melodies drifting up through the floor, the occasional muffled whoop or shout. He’s taken a bottle of Muggle gin up with him, provided by Lily, and takes a swig from it. In the haze of this vaguely pleasant melancholy he thinks, it wouldn’t be so bad really, to be in this moment forever. He thinks of the conversation with Dumbledore and drinks again from the bottle.

A crashing sound and he looks around to see Sirius moving unsteadily towards him.

“There you are! What are you doing up here?”

“Just having a fag.”

“Give us one, then.”

“I’ve only got roll ups.”

“I could roll better than you blindfolded, hand it over.”

Despite the blatant falsehood Remus does, reaching into his pocket for rizlas and his little packet of tobacco. Sirius comes to stand next to him, bending over to roll on the windowsill. “What’s that you’re drinking?” he asks.

“Gin.”

“What the fuck’s that? Shit.” He’s messed up rolling the first time, so has to start again. Remus could take the piss, but given his newfound state of inner calm he decides to pretend he hasn’t seen.

“Try some.” He passes it to Sirius, who pauses in his catastrophic rolling to take a swig. He splutters.

“That’s fucking awful. Here, drink this instead.” He hands over a bottle of red wine, Wizarding stuff, the label peeling and clearly old. Remus drinks from the bottle. He may as well. He doesn’t really know anything about wine. There’s rarely any alcohol in his parents’ house, and the occasional visit to one of his uncles in Wrexham is usually limited to canned lager for the men and a screw-top for the women at dinner. Anyway, he’s too drunk to taste much now. “That’s good wine, you know.”

“Yeah?” Remus lifts the bottle to his lips again.

“Nabbed it from Alphard’s when we were clearing out the house so it’s probably worth a bomb. I’ve been saving it.” Remus lowers the bottle and looks at Sirius, who’s determinedly staring down at his hands he attempts to roll again. Something rises in his chest. Not affection, so much, as a kind of understanding. Here Sirius is, come to find him and offer him some of his dead uncle’s wine. Remus is gripped suddenly by the desire to take the cigarette gently from his fingers and roll it for him. But Sirius has managed, at last, clamping it between his lips and lighting it with the tip of his wand. “Pass us it.”

As Remus hands him the bottle Sirius’ fingertips brush against his knuckles. For a strange half-moment he thinks he can feel them there still, an imprint on his empty hand. Sirius tips the bottle against his lips, drinking long and deep, and when he puts it down again his lips are rouged. He looks ridiculous, and a little debauched. Like a Victorian dandy, cynical amongst his own revelry. Remus’ stomach twists.

For a while neither of them speaks. Then Sirius says: “Weird to think this is our last Christmas holiday here.”

This is a topic that Remus avoids with almost maniacal dedication, so he just shrugs. “I suppose.”

“Fuck knows what’s next.”

Remus watches the smoke from their cigarettes curl against the night air. He could tell him, he realises. About the offer. “Yeah.”

Sirius is looking at him now. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t bloody know, Padfoot.”

“All right. Fair enough.”

He doesn’t know why he says it. “It’s not like they’re all going to be queueing up to offer me jobs.”

“Well, me neither, given my name’s mud.”

Little pulse of irritation. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s not all that different.”

“Well I’d say it’s quite different since it’s not like anyone thinks you’re going to eat their fucking children.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that. You don’t know what rumours my mother’s been spreading.”

Remus laughs, once, more like a cough. More at Sirius’ mind-bending self-absorption than anything else. He should be used to it by now. He shouldn’t feel it like this. “If you say so.”

Sirius glances at him sideways. “You know, after, if you don’t. You know, if you don’t want to move back in with your parents, you could move in with me.”

He snorts. “What, sleep on the sofa?”

“I’m probably going to move somewhere bigger. I wouldn’t ask you to pay rent or anything.”

“Oh brilliant. You can be the first donor to the Remus Lupin charity for hopeless fucking cases.”

“I’m just saying, the offer’s there.”

“Well, thanks, Sirius, but I think I’ll manage.”

There’s a pause. Then: “It’s not like I did anything to deserve the money, you know. It’s just there.”

“It’s not that, it’s just that despite appearances I’ve actually still got some pride.”

Now Sirius snorts. “Right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It sounded like it did.”

“Why can’t you just say, thanks for the offer? It wasn’t meant as an insult, you know.”

“Thanks for the offer, then.”

A silence opens up between them, during which Remus forces himself not to look at Sirius’ face. Instead he focuses on the way their bodies are positioned. He’s standing facing outwards, while Sirius leans with his back against the windowsill, twisting occasionally to exhale out the window or allow some ash to fall into Remus’ poorly transfigured ashtray. There’s maybe the width of two flat palms between them. He could reach out across the tiny distance, let his hand brush against Sirius’ hip. A wordless apology. He stays still. Takes another drag.

“You’ve got wine on your lips,” says Sirius eventually.

“So do you.”

“I imagine it suits me better.”

“Probably. Most things do.”

“You’re no fun, you know.”

“Well we can’t always be all things to all people.”

“You’re insufferable sometimes.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it you know.”

“I didn’t doubt you.”

“Remus. For fuck’s sake.” And Sirius’ hand is resting against the line of Remus’ jaw, now forcing him to turn and face him. “You must know. You must fucking know by now.”

It’s weird then, because Remus is sure he’s about to pull away, or tell Sirius to get off him, or make some inane joke. But it’s as though what’s about to happen has already happened. As though this is just another iteration of an action that somewhere is happening infinitely, a part of the circular time of the cosmos. Maybe he’s just drunk. Or maybe –

Something, somewhere, moves incrementally. And they are kissing.

Sirius tastes of red wine and cigarettes, and Remus hears the little inhale of breath through his nose as the tips of their tongues touch. A question, an answer. He knows it himself. There’s a rhythm to this, their bodies aligning, and he feels the flicker of it as his hand moves up the back of Sirius’ neck. This, he thinks. All along, and it was this. His cigarette end is still caught between his fingers, leaving his other arm limp and uncertain at his side. He pulls away for a moment to stub it out in the ashtray, not looking at Sirius before he leans forward so their lips meet again. Now he finds the back of Sirius’ head, fingers pushing up through his hair as he pulls them closer together. Sirius’ hand drifts lower down his back, and he thinks, this, this, this, and then he hears footsteps and wrenches himself away.

They have just enough time to recover themselves before Peter walks in. It seems so ridiculous, like something from a comedy film, and Remus finds himself raising a hand to his mouth to muffle a snort. A sort of near-hysteria. The desperate feeling of his heart in his chest, like something winged and trapped.

“I’ve been looking for you for ages,” says Peter.

“Fuck’s sake, Wormtail, can’t you manage five minutes by yourself?” says Sirius.

Before his tone might have been enough to send Peter on his way, but recently he’s grown in confidence and staying power. He wanders over to them. “Prongs is off with Lily. Anyway, it’s nearly midnight. You should come down. Can I have some of that wine?”

“No,” says Sirius, turning to face the window. “It’s all gone.”

Remus, as ever, is quicker to regain his composure. “Here, Wormy,” he says, passing him the gin. “Have some of this.”

Peter drinks some. His face contorts in disgust. “That’s horrible.” He hands it back. “You coming, then?”

“Yeah. You coming Padfoot?” He doesn’t dare look directly at Sirius, instead focusing on a spot just above his shoulder. It doesn’t matter anyway. He doesn’t turn to face them.

“In a bit,” he says. Remus watches his back, framed in the rectangle of the window as he drains the last of the wine. He turns back to Peter to see him looking between them, a half-confusion in his face. He knows, Remus thinks. He knows and doesn’t know, because he won’t believe it.

Suddenly he’s gripped by the knowledge that he should stay. He should let Peter go down alone, doesn’t matter what he says to get rid of him. He should put a hand on Sirius’ shoulder, turn him gently and kiss him again. He should tell him everything. All that he’s thought about the two of them, but about the other stuff too. About how he went to go and see McGonagall in her office and Dumbledore was there, waiting. About what he said. And what he asked him, and asked of him.

“See you later, then,” he says.

As he turns to go perhaps he’s thinking of how he’ll broach this later in the night, how he’ll come back and pick up where they left off. But really he knows. He won’t come back. And they won’t speak of it again.

 

Now he rubs a hand over his face to try to dispel the dregs of his hangover. No luck. So he stands and dresses quickly, unsure how long he’s been caught in reverie. From his bedroom he can hear _The Velvet Underground_ playing on his turntable. When he reaches the threshold of the room Sirius is sitting on the end of his bed, two cups of tea by his feet, with Remus’ new year’s resolutions in his lap. Remus stops in the doorway.

“I cast some warming charms in here,” says Sirius, without looking up. “You know it was so cold I could see my breath.”

“Mine must have just worn off.”

“It was cold when I came in.”

“Maybe I’m just desensitised. I’ve frozen off my nerve endings or something.” Sirius doesn’t respond. “Should we turn this down? Yusuf might be studying.”

“He’s out. I saw him going when I came in.”

“Oh. Right.”

Lou Reed is singing: _What goes on in your mind? I think that I am falling down_.

Sirius gestures towards the carpet. “Your tea’s probably cold by now.”

“I don’t mind.” At last Remus enters, sitting on the bed beside Sirius. A gap at least the size of a whole other person between them. He bends down and picks up one of the cups. Takes a sip. Cold. “Thanks.”

“They’re not very precise, your resolutions.”

Remus lets himself breathe in and out again. Thinks about what he’ll do tomorrow. Wake up early and get the bus down to Walthamstow market to buy fruit and veg, maybe some cereal from the Weigh and Pay. Clean the bathroom. Send off his fortnightly application for any Wizarding job. Go to work at the restaurant in the evening. Forget last night, and today. Just forget about it, like it never happened. “I don’t think I was that coherent when I wrote them.”

“Particularly intrigued by, what is it? ‘Face own mortality with grace and equanimity’.” Sirius looks at him directly and he feels trapped, like an insect on its back, legs twitching uselessly at the air. _One minute born, one minute doomed_ , sings Lou.

His only option, he realises, is a counter-attack: “Why are you here, Sirius?”

“I wanted to check you were all right.”

“It’s just you never come here, not without James anyway, and now you’ve chosen this morning when I feel like shit to come over and interrogate me about something stupid that I wrote pissed – ”

“Oh, give over – ”

“It’s just a stupid thing…”

“What, facing your own fucking mortality? What’s that supposed to mean, Remus? Seriously, tell me, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Because the other two are pretty fucking weird, mate, but your own fucking _mortality_ – ”

“Yeah, all right, you don’t have to keep saying it!”

“Well clearly I fucking do because you wrote it and I want to know why!”

“Well maybe it’s none of your fucking business why!”

He hears his own words reverberate back at him and realises that he’s nearly shouting. Some of his tea has slopped onto his jeans. He can’t remember them ever arguing like this, even when – well. Even when things were the worst they ever were.

“I’m sorry,” says Remus, eventually. He sets the cup back down carefully on the carpet.

“It’s fine.”

“It isn’t, really.”

“Well, no. It’s not.”

Neither of them says anything for a while. Remus wonders whether he’s become incautious. For the first time it occurs to him that Sirius might be concerned about his various disappearing acts, last night included. It was easier when he and Lily and James were doing their Auror training. No one noticed then, not really. That Remus disappeared for nights at a time. That he received owls at strange hours that self-immolated after reading. And of course no one _would_ notice the strange disconnect he felt looking in the dirty mirror after a mission, wondering at the face that stared back at him, cold and unmoving. _Face own mortality with grace and equanimity (ha)_. But he isn’t laughing, not really. Especially not now, as Dumbledore hints at something bigger, something unique. Remus possesses only one unique attribute as far as Dumbledore is concerned, and he knows that soon he will be called upon to use it for the cause.

Sirius is the first to speak into the silence. “Just because…” He pauses. Visibly breathes in. “ _I_ don’t regret it, you know.”

Steady thump thump thump of his heart. “What do you mean.”

A sideways look. “You know what I mean. Last new year. If that’s what this is all about.”

“All what?”

“This. You know. You being weird. Around me.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You have been, ever since.”

Remus wants to laugh out loud. Of course, of _course_ , to Sirius’ mind everything comes back to himself. And worse still, he can’t even deny the sliver of truth in it. “It’s not – that’s not everything.”

“Some of it though.”

“All right, some of it, maybe. Yeah.”

“I’d actually wanted to do it for, you know. Quite some time.”

“I don’t regret it either.” He tries to think of the best thing to say next, the right thing, that will make this conversation easy. Nothing arises. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

“I wasn’t that pissed.”

“You were, after.”

“Fine, after, yeah. But not by then.”

A pause. “I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s been a year.”

“I’m not saying I want anything now.”

Remus makes himself absorb this without reacting. Like some ridiculous childhood proof of endurance, not flinching when someone moves to punch you in the face. “Well, yeah. Fair enough.”

“I’m not saying anything, is what I mean.”

“Right. Okay.”

 _I don’t know what it’s all about_ , sings Lou, the record still spinning. “You said it wasn’t everything,” says Sirius after a while.

“Well, it’s not.”

“But you won’t tell me what else.”

“It’s not – I can’t.”

“You can’t.” His voice flat, expressionless.

For a moment it feels as though Remus’ body is revolting from the inside out. He swallows. Eventually he says: “I want to.”

Sirius is very still now and Remus can tell looking at the side of his face that he’s clenching his jaw. And he thinks about the last moon, a bad transformation because he was already ill. How he’d woken lying in the dark mulch of the forest floor with the sound of rain falling through the tree branches. _Drip, drip, drip_. The pain of it, as he lay there, pressing from within so that he felt hollowed out and then filled with it, a receptacle for agony. And terror, too, animal fear, at pain like that. Warm wetness seeping from somewhere on his cheekbone. _Drip, drip, drip_. And then, slowly, slowly: Sirius, there. Crouched beside him, a hand resting on his forehead, whispering, Moony, Moony, please.

 _Try to be good_. But what use is it, really? What use has it ever been? I will tell him, now. This time, I will tell him everything.

“Sirius.” Something, somewhere, moves incrementally. It’s the first day of the new year, 1979, and it’s not the beginning of anything, because whatever it is began long ago. But still. Sirius is looking at him. And without saying anything, Remus leans forward, and closes the distance between them.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading this little story in which functionally nothing really happens ! if you have any questions/concerns as ever feel free to comment or to contact me on tumblr [@r-ougeatre](https://r-ougeatre.tumblr.com/) x


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